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Working in marketing, one of the hardest things to get right — at least for me — is naming things.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how important naming things are and one of the great examples I’ve been tossing around in my head lately is “global warming” vs. “climate change.”

In the early days of the discussion of what carbon was doing to the environment, “global warming” was used quite often.

And, it’s true. Carbon emissions are causing the planet to warm up. But, global warming is not such a great name for everything else that is happening. Environmental advocates have been trying to get “climate change” used more, but global warming still floats around.

Once a name is out there, it’s hard to get something known by something else.

If you had been hesitating to sign up for this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (#14ntc), some great news today! They’ve extended the registration deadline two weeks until 2/14. That gives you another two weeks to convince your boss that you should attend NTC.

Here are some great reasons why you should attend:

You get the opportunity to meet me! And, 2000+ other people. Community is my favorite part of each year’s NTC and seeing all of the awesome nonprofit techie people is fantastic. I have even been known to come hang out in the lobby at conferences I haven’t been able to attend.

You get to hear some amazing speakers. Whether you’re a super techie, a coder techie, a marketing techie (like me) or an accidental techie, NTC definitely has the content for you. You can even spend a good chunk of the day prior to the conference talking with some of the top nonprofit Drupal experts. Some of the panels I’m post looking forward to:
- Unlocking Hidden Gems: Tales of Social Intelligence Wizardry and ROI of Supporter Acquisition
- Online Testing – Practical Insights & Lessons Learned
- Engage all the Things: Rethinking Online Engagement
- Strategy is not a 4-Letter Word: How setting a plan for your online approach reaps rewards
- 2014 M+R Benchmarks
- Email Matters – Three Case Studies from Acquisition to Conversion
- Salesforce 101: What it is and what is right for your organization
- Progressive Enchantment: Crafting a Responsive Design
- Mark Your Calendars: How to Create Holiday Fundraising Digital Campaigns … Not Just at Year-End
- Make it Mobile
- Choosing the right partner for your next website or CRM Project

The amazing social events. Many of the sponsors hold evening activities that are super fun. You also have #ntcbeer, an annual event that many people look forward to attending. And, you can’t forget about geek games, which finish off the event.

Charity: Water always does an excellent job with their marketing, and their campaigns for the 2013 Holiday Season were certainly no exception.

In my opinion, one of the best ways to increase engagement with social media — which eventually may lead to donations — is to make sure that your messages that people are seeing on social media match what they are receiving in the email inboxes.

Charity: Water started out with a very simple message in early December. It’s message was straightforward and very clean to read.

Throughout the next couple of weeks, Charity Water sent out a series of messages highlighting each of the topics discussed in it’s first email. The little thumbnails that were in the message on December 12th became the centerpiece of new messages.

At the same time, Charity: Water shared the same image and message on their Facebook page.

Charity: Water used these paired images throughout the holidays to integrate their social media and their email marketing efforts.

Their final message at end-of-year incorporated several of the images in one message. They used the same image on Facebook that day.

Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new way for nonprofits to collect donations via Facebook. I shared my take here. While I love the idea of people being able to immediately donate to a nonprofit on Facebook, there is a something that nonprofits need more.

Facebook needs to launch an ad grant program similar to Google Grants.

That’s why I’m supporting this petition that calls on Facebook to launch an ad grants program.

The Google grant program has been a great success for Google — and for the nonprofits that participate in the grant program. When I was with EMQ FamiliesFirst, we used our Google grant to build brand awareness, recruit donors and also to help recruit foster parents. In fact, our foster parent ads were the most successful of all the ads we ran on Google.

As Facebook continues to tweak its Edgerank algorithm, it’s made it clear that in order to get into people’s news feeds, brands need to be willing to pay for advertising. For large brands with huge marketing budgets, that’s awesome. But, for cash-strapped nonprofits, that’s a challenge. An ad grant program would go a long way to helping nonprofits reach those that may be interested in supporting their cause.

And, there’s an easy way for Facebook to turn this into a win-win. Facebook wants people to make donations to nonprofits on Facebook because those transactions add to the collective of information that Facebook has about that person, and it also makes it easier in the future for those users to complete other transactions (like Facebook gifts). Having an ad grant program which drives more people to a nonprofit’s Facebook profile will lead to increase in donations on Facebook’s new donation platform. The nonprofit wins with increased visibility. Facebook wins with more users using its transaction system.

Today, Facebook announced a new donate feature that offers participating nonprofits the ability to quickly accept nonprofits via their Facebook profile.

Facebook users can choose to donate $10, $25, $50, $100 or $250. And, they can either donate with a credit card or via a Paypal account.

There’s a lot of good news about this announcement.

First, Facebook is covering all of the transaction costs, so 100% of the donation made is going to the nonprofit.

Second, the donation from a user perspective is super simple. I had previously made a Facebook transaction using my paypal account, so it literally took me under a minute to make a donation.

I also received a thank you almost immediately from Facebook with the co-branding of the nonprofit thanking me for my donation.

What I think is missing:

I’m not presented with an opportunity to share that I just made the donation with my Facebook friends. This seems like a key missing step.

Facebook is also not allowing users to opt-in to sharing their information with the nonprofits. This decreases the amount of future engagement the nonprofit can have with the donor.

I also cannot change a donation amount. If I wanted to give a specific amount, this isn’t possible. It’s also not possible to give a donation of more than $250.

Another major missing piece is the nonprofits that were chosen to participate in the campaign. While it’s a great list — with many nonprofits that I support — the list is of mostly expected nonprofits (WWF, American Red Cross, Water.org, Livestrong, UNICEF, etc.). It would have been great to see some unexpected nonprofits on the list. Nonprofits not on the initial rollout do have an opportunity to apply to be part of the program, but there’s no timeline on when those applications will be accepted.

It will be interesting to see how nonprofits choose to use this feature. Will they encourage people to make donations, even with the limitation that they won’t receive donor information? Will they choose to send people to their donation page instead? Will they try to use other tools, like ActionSprout, to increase engagement and gain donor information?

One of the biggest challenges with a day like #GivingTuesday or with holiday giving season in general is that you spend so much time preparing for the campaign and cheerleading for engagement and donations that when its over you just want to be done.

But, it’s important to complete the cycle and say thank you to your supporters.

Here are some of my favorite thank yous I saw after #GivingTuesday …

What I love about the MDA thank you is that its easily shareable on social media. It highlights what the thank you is for (#GivingTuesday) and it gives other ways to get involved and continue supporting MDA.

This is another one that I really loved. It highlights #GivingTuesday and also highlights the League of Women Voters in a great way.

So, this thank you is almost great. A) Everyone loves dogs and animal photos are hugely shareable. B) It says Thank You and talks about #GivingTuesday. However, the major bummer is they didn’t incorporate any of their own branding into the image and so as soon as someone shares it, it gets disconnected from the nonprofit that created it.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past couple of days looking at different #GivingTuesday campaigns. (And, also reviewing what many nonprofits were doing leading up to #GivingTuesday.)

Far and away, the nonprofit that I thought did the best in regards to marketing #GivingTuesday was No Kid Hungry.

There are likely nonprofits that raised more on #GivingTuesday than #NoKidHungry, but here’s what I thought they did right.

First, they started talking about #GivingTuesday at least a week before December 3rd.

They set up a ThunderClap campaign to allow supporters to “donate” a tweet on GivingTuesday to promote the campaign. They had 322 people sign up for Thunderclap with a reach of 2.7 million. Their thunderclap not only got people to donate their support, but also had great information on it about their campaign.

Here are how a randomly selected 100 organizations chose to ask people to give. By complete coincidence, exactly half pointed people to one of their main donation forms with no mention of holiday giving or GivingTuesday on the donation page. (Note: I did not include any of the Indiegogo or Razoo campaign pages on this list.)